Although she was the most annoying and thoroughly unbearable creature I had ever encountered, over the next few months I managed to finish countless poems about her, which I hid in the record sleeve of my favorite album, Wham! Greatest Hits. I also became an avid tennis fan. I imagined us as grownups in the crowd behind the players, wearing stonewashed jeans, terry-cloth socks, and Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses that came free with any purchase of fragrance.

But the truth is, I didn’t speak to Hadley for several years after the incident with our bully⁠—except to ask if she knew the capital of Copenhagen during a geography test.

The point is, she saved me, and this story is about how⁠—more than two decades later⁠—I had to save her.

20.

Before I tell you everything important, I need to think for a moment; dying has given me the luxury of time by taking it away.

So, it was an act of violence that brought Hadley and me together⁠—a moment of fierceness and courage (and good aim) on her part, but cruelty nonetheless that began our friendship and led eventually to marriage.

After our move to New York, when the internet became part of our daily lives, I looked for the bully.

Nothing on MySpace.

Not a single thing anywhere.

Years later, I searched with Hadley⁠—she remembered more about him⁠—and this time we were on Facebook.

Zip. Zilch, not a sausage.

It turns out he didn’t have a presence because he was dead, had ceased living before we allowed social media to preserve the moments of our lives by stealing them.

Eventually we discovered a single newspaper article about him through Google, a story someone had scanned in for reasons we will never know. At eighteen, he’d been tried and found guilty of assaulting his own child, her sixteen-year-old mother, and a police officer named Sebastian. At nineteen, he hung himself with a prison bedsheet.

From his short, violent existence had sprung everything in mine that is beautiful.

If there is such a thing as fate, it’s not that life is already written and we’re simply unwitting figures in lines of spiritual code⁠—it’s that we are at the mercy of things imposed on us in childhood. The future of humanity is not decided by politicians in big rooms with untouched glasses of water, but by children at recess untangling the world through play.

Furthermore, if it hadn’t been for a drunk, who in 1981 lunged for my future-wife’s-mother’s-breasts in a pub because Manchester United beat Liverpool, which resulted in her smashing a pint glass over his head in front of her seven-year-old, tennis-obsessed daughter, then Hadley and I would be on different paths, two oblivious human comets, which we are anyway because perfection is not a singular propitious direction, but the mechanism of choice.

Okay, let’s get on now.